


Comms

by bluntblade



Series: In My Head and On My Mind [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Backstage in Battle, Character Study, Not Canon Compliant - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Reydel-in-progress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:00:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23482069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluntblade/pseuds/bluntblade
Summary: Since Poe roped her into the Falcon's crew, putting her almost on the front line and aboard the same ship as Rey, Kaydel's job has only got more stressful. As for which causes more stress, she's no idea...
Relationships: Finn/Rose Tico, Kaydel Ko Connix & Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey & Rose Tico, Kaydel Ko Connix & Rey, Kaydel Ko Connix/Rey
Series: In My Head and On My Mind [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1719016
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	Comms

Kaydel's riding into battle. Sort of. She's on the Millennium Falcon, one seat behind Poe and Chewie and feeling the dual kick of the ship's cannons reverberate through its hull.

Lutaqen V is war-torn already. The First Order are bent on its annexation and have come with an army that the Resistance couldn't hope to fight. So they're not trying, much as it hurts them. They're streaking in under the bow wave of the attack, looking to snatch a handful of operatives and other assets before the might of the enemy crashes down. 

But Kaydel's not manning either of those guns, and she isn't one of those pulling on armour and rolling their shoulders in the hold, readying themselves for the fight. Kaydel is Comms.

Her part in the action is tending to the scanning array, sharing that duty with Rose, and a communications net which is all hers, coordinating with the troops on the ground. She is the eyes and ears in the sky for Captains Rey and Finn, while Poe and Chewie are their air support and ticket out of the warzone.

The enemy’s presence here is thin. They haven’t spotted the Falcon yet. But Stormtrooper companies will be spreading into this precinct from the north, storming every block, taking prisoners and killing those who resist. 

Their mission is to retrieve a Senator who’s supported the Resistance for years. That he hasn’t been pulled out already is a mark of how sudden this invasion has been - never let it be said that the First Order doesn’t know how to strike fast and hard. 

The Falcon’s dropping now, towards the landing site which Kaydel’s flagged up for Poe. They’ll drop Rey, Finn and the Scrappers here, pull out and find a suitable rendezvous site. That, and fend off anything with a TIE engine which comes at them.

She finds but doesn't articulate some excuse to duck into the hold. Poe doesn't make an issue of it.

The Scrappers are making final checks and trying not to squash Gial the Porg underfoot. Kaydel wonders if the little creature headbutted the windscreen too hard once, or if he was hatched daft. She deals with it pragmatically, plucking him off the floor and setting him on the dejarik table, out of danger.

Rey is mostly ready, plucking her staff from its usual corner, only she's forgotten again where her helmet is. Kaydel snatches it up and tries not to look too triumphant when she presents it. Rey smiles and ducks a little to let Kaydel set it on her head.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” For a moment Kaydel sees an opening - a bad choice of words but it’s the one that comes to her, as Rey holds her eyes for a few seconds longer than she needs to. As she bites her lip just a little…

Then Rey gathers herself, shifting her posture a little. Kaydel lets it go. “Force be with you, Rey.”

She stands aside, watching the little ritual Rey goes through as Finn and the Scrappers tense. The shoulders hunch, the staff tilts a little and its shock-generators snap into life, and her teeth begin to look just a little scary. And a small voice in Kaydel’s head remarks once again that it’s still kind of hot.

Next thing, the hatch opens, flooding the hold with light and the din of the battle outside. Rey, Finn and their squad snap into motion, sprinting down the ramp and out into the fray. Gial hops off the table and tries to follow, screaming what for all the world sounds like a war cry, but Kaydel just catches him before he can take wing. She and R2 are left in the hold with the Porg. Hoping - silently in Kaydel’s case, though R2 bleeps his wish - that they’ll all come back safely.

The Falcon has begun to lift away the moment that last foot is off the ramp. By the time Kaydel’s back in the cockpit, it’s well away from the dropsite.

Poe gives her a brief glance when she returns to her seat, and an encouraging smile that says  _ next time, kid _ . She pulls a sceptical frown. It’s difficult to match Poe’s optimism sometimes, as infectious as it is.

Rose is fretting next to her, though she tries to hide it. Kaydel reaches out to her, just to comfort her friend a little, and it elicits a nervous smile. Rose, if she’s honest with herself, has more reason to feel nervous. On the day of Crait, Rose saw her now partner almost killed twice in just a few hours.

And of course, Finn actually is her partner. Kaydel, in contrast, is just fretting over a crush. 

She can tell herself that she's worrying about one of the Resistance's great heroes and the hope of the Jedi. But that's how people who don't know Rey talk about her, in Kaydel's experience. More and more, for her part, she thinks of Rey as just  _ Rey _ . Hard not to when the woman's been inside her head.

That probably doesn't help her worrying.

The notion that this dimension to her fears shouldn’t exist is hard to shake. She finds that she envies Rose her certainty with Finn.

And she doesn't like that feeling either. It feels… unsisterly? Uncomradely? Kaydel settles for unbecoming. It feels unbecoming to be jealous of something that makes Rose and Finn so happy, but she can’t help but feel a little wistful when she sees them walking hand in hand, or snuggled up together in the hold during a meal.

It’s not even that Kaydel wants Rose’s boyfriend - she swings resolutely in the other direction. But she wants what they have together, and that doesn’t just mean an excuse to sleep in a cabin rather than throwing a bedroll down in the compartment among the Scrappers.

_ Enough _ , she tells herself. She’s got a job to do here. Rey’s beacon shows clearly on the display in front of her, but so too do a lot of First Order signals.

“Poe, we’ve got bombers inbound to the north, three clicks.”

“Stormtroopers two clicks east of them,” Rose adds.

“On it.” Poe shunts the Falcon into a hard swing right - the Force help anyone who isn’t buckled up. The display on the back of his seat tells Kaydel that he’s going for the enemy infantry first. Looking closer gives her his reasons. There’s a causeway between the Stormtroopers and this precinct, crossing far above one of the rivers that divide the city.

Ki’rii and Tannell are still manning the turrets, and they kick back into life the second Poe gives the order. The shots rake the bridge, already heaving with Stormtroopers, and the stone shatters. The scanner doesn’t really capture it, but Kaydel can imagine the enemy troops who have been hurled into the air, to plummet down to the water. She feels a moment’s queasiness, before she reminds herself that this is to keep their friends safe.

Poe’s on the radio to Jess, who leads Black Squadron in his stead. The fighters went straight for the bombers and have downed two, herding the rest west. Right into the Falcon’s sights, and a quick spray of shots takes the wings from two bombs and blows another clean apart. The remaining five are taken out by the fighters or flee.

But that’s not an end to the danger by any stretch. The First Order know the Falcon’s here. If the commanding general - Panadee? - is like some of the enemy’s commanders, every spare fighter is about to be thrown at them. They need to stay intact and Kaydel needs to stay alert to find a suitable extraction point, the second Rey and company have their target.

It’s a unique kind of helplessness. Kaydel can identify threats, but otherwise she’s dependent on the people at the controls. She can only watch the TIEs swoop in, shout warnings to Poe, and hope the gunners and Jess’ pilots are sharp enough to take them out.

If they’re hit then maybe, just maybe, they could survive a crash-landing. But that will only leave them all stranded on a world overrun by the First Order, when they’re meant to be the rescue party. So Kaydel flinches and winces every time a shot hits their shields or a missile narrowly misses them.

Poe and Chewbacca barely speak while they fly like this. Surprising to some, but Kaydel understands that this is because they’ve come to know each other very well as pilots. There’s a well-earned trust in each other’s abilities. It would be just the same if you swapped Rey for either of them, she knows. A mark of how close-knit the whole crew has become over nearly two years of war.

One the one hand, that knowledge is comforting to her. On the other hand, there’s very little to drown out the squeals of enemy fire and the howls of TIE engines, dopplering past them on tight attack vectors. Even the babble of R2’s running arguments with the Falcon’s computer - three bodged-together droid brains, none of them cooperative by nature - is easily lost in the din.

For one horrible second a dive-bombing TIE Interceptor fills the forward viewport and Kaydel lets out a blurted scream. Then Jess catches it with a pinpoint torpedo strike and the craft becomes shrapnel, pinging off the Falcon’s shields.

Time loses meaning for Kaydel, except for the abstract notion that they’re running down the clock - or, alternatively, buying time for Rey to get to the Senator, hopefully find him alive and get him out. 

Instead the dogfight is just one attack, one kill, after the next. Until finally the moment Kaydel has been praying for - Rey’s beacon pulses green. They have the Senator, even if they’re too busy to talk much. 

Her fingers race over the console. “Rey, I’ve found an extraction point.” She reels off the directions, trying not to let her emotions cloud her voice, narrowly avoiding a route that’s been bombed-out. Simultaneously, Rose is shunting coordinates to Poe, trying to guide him along a route that shouldn’t make their goal clear to the enemy.

It’s a horribly narrow window once they reach it. Every second they linger puts them closer to being caught out and killed. As always though, Poe threads the needle.  _ As almost always _ , she corrects herself inwardly, feeling a familiar rush of shame - but she puts that to one side. Rey taught her better than that, damnit.

And speaking of Rey, finally the beacon is close enough to the extraction point. “Commander, we’re go!”

The Falcon immediately breaks off from its seeming trajectory, swinging around to a bombed-out plaza. As it goes, the radio crackles, Rey’s voice. “Falcon, tell me you’re close.”

“There already,” Kaydel grins despite her nerves, and wider at Rey’s relieved breath.

“Ramp down,” Poe declares, and before Rose is even out of the cockpit there’s a drumming of feet on the ramp.

The Scrappers pile aboard, plus the Senator and his three remaining guards. Rose all but leaps into Finn’s arms, leaving Kaydel to make her way through a barrage of backslaps from the elated Scrappers and accept polite handshakes from the evacuees.

Poe shouts from the cockpit. They’re away.

Then Rey’s in front of her. “Hi.” She’s still breathing hard. “And thanks.” Her breastplate thumps hard into Kaydel’s chest when she embraces her, but Kaydel doesn’t mind that too much.

“Well…” Kaydel decides to chance it, “you’re not exactly hard to keep watching.” She winces inwardly at her own clumsy wording, but Rey doesn’t seem fussed. She’s still hugging her, after all, and there’s just the hint of a blush in her cheeks…

But that’s as long as the moment lasts. Quite suddenly, Rey seems to realise her hand is only just above Kaydel’s butt and pulls away quickly, awkwardly.

“I-I’d better shower. Catch you later, Kaydel.”

Which is just plain unhelpful, because that immediately kicks off Kaydel’s imagination. No one notices the frustrated look on her face, they’re too busy celebrating.

Poe’s right, there is  _ something _ there in the way Rey looks at her. But Kaydel just can’t coax it out.

She makes for the cockpit, trying not to look resentful when she passes Finn and Rose, and slumps into her seat. Gial approaches, wanting attention, but she's lost in her worries.  _ Next time, kid. _

She wonders how long she can go on believing it.


End file.
